


Ciphers

by Alex51324



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Gen, Reboot Fic, tall!Illya
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-08-18
Packaged: 2018-04-15 04:06:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4592286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alex51324/pseuds/Alex51324
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three interconnected ficlets, set early in the team's time working together, in which they see new sides of each other:<br/>1. On a mission early in their partnership, Solo sees a surprising side of the Red Peril. <br/>2. Illya and Gaby have more in common than either of them realized.  <br/>3. Illya thought Cowboy was as shallow as a mirror.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mayamaia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayamaia/gifts).



> This fic was inspired by mayamaia's (iwilltrytobereasonable on Tumblr's) theory for reconciling tall!Illya with original Illya, which goes like this, "This is the AU in which he was 8 inches taller and twice the weight, so even though he’s clearly just as smart, Illya just wasn’t trained the same way. Which mostly just sucks for him. They didn’t send him to the Sorbonne and Cambridge, they just gave him extra combat training. So you’ve got Illya’s brain, but with superiors treating him kind of as a brute or robot, he’s got even less humor or interpersonal skills, and obviously needs a hug."
> 
> So that got me started thinking about a fic in which tall!Illya discovers that it doesn't have to be that way on his new team, and writing that got me thinking about other things the team could learn about each other.

The table and floor around Napoleon were littered with crumpled and scratched-out efforts at decoding. He'd thought lifting Von Volokohnsky’s briefcase, photographing the communiqué, and returning the case undetected would be the hard part of the job; as it turned out, he'd barely gotten started. Peril, lounging on the hotel room's other bed, was reading a newspaper and eating chips out of a paper bag. Napoleon was reminded of a steer at the feeding trough. Groaning in frustration, Napoleon shoved his hands through his hair.

Great, now he was going to have to style it again.

"Having trouble, Cowboy?"

"Almost there," Napoleon said.

With a huffy sigh, the giant Russian got up. Snatching the notepad out of Napoleon's hand, he said, "You haven't figured out yet that it is Polybius Square? I thought you said you knew what you were doing."

"It isn't," Napoleon said. "That was one of the first things I tried."

"Shifting Polybius Square with keyword." He dropped the pad and picked up the photograph. "'Production proceeding on schedule. Ready for implementation in three to five days. Suggest test run 28 August, possible target--' Next is coordinates; I haven't figured out that part."

Napoleon looked up at him in surprise.

"I saw it when I was developing film."

"And you just...decoded it in your head?"

The only response was a flat look, the kind Napoleon had thought--until now--was particularly bovine.

Napoleon shook his head. "So you're more than just a pretty face, huh, Peril?"

"For spy, you are not very observant, Cowboy." Illya handed him the newspaper. "Go comb your hair; I'll finish this."

#

Rummaging around in the bag for another chip, Illya took a glance over at Solo. As soon as the photographic print of the coded communiqué had been dry, Solo had commandeered it, the room’s sole table and chair, and a tablet of hotel stationary, claiming with his usual bravado that decoding was, “My department, Peril.”

Illya had let him do it. He’d been in the bathroom developing photos while Solo and Gaby went to dinner, and he was hungry. 

Besides, he was used to being sidelined during operations calling for brains rather than brawn. He’d picked up a local newspaper—he didn’t speak Portuguese, but he had a little Spanish and thought he could figure it out. 

He could, mostly, but he had trouble focusing on it, with the coded message clicking away at the back of his mind. It was printed in numbers, so, obviously, a substitution cipher. But the frequency-pattern of the numbers didn’t match that of English or any other language Illya knew, so it must be a shifting cipher. 

There were no digits higher than a five. Polybius Square? Calling up the image in his mind, he checked the number of digits in each line. All even. If _he_ was using a Polybius square, he’d break up the line lengths to obscure that pattern, but that might not have occurred to them. 

Just for fun, he tried reading the first sequence as a regular Polybius square:: 45134424142311334443.

That would be…T-C-S-I-D-H-A-S-R. Gibberish. He tried it again for each full-line-shift permutation—starting with F as 11, and moving A down to 51, and so on. More gibberish. 

Mid-line shifts, maybe…but a keyword would be easier for the gang to remember, and harder for an outside party to decipher. He tried the name of the city they were in, and the name of the Hierarchy’s leader’s daughter. 

Frowning, Illya chewed meditatively on another chip. A random keyword would be optimal, but these men were theatrical; they’d pick something that meant something to them. “Hierarchy” was a little long for the purpose, but he tried it anyway—no good. But there was another thing….

Right, Gaby had overheard one of the men talking about calling something in to “thrush central.” They had thought it was a coded reference to a place—possibly named for the local wildlife or equine hoof disease—but maybe it wasn’t. 

Plugging “THRUS” into the first line of his Polybius square, Illya got P-R-O-D-U-C-T-I-O-N-K-W-J-R-S-S….

That first string was too long to be a coincidence; the first word of the message had to be either ‘production” or “product,” followed by a shift in the code. Could be either one; the Hierarchy was developing some kind of chemical weapon, and the message could be about the production of it, or the product itself. 

He decided to try “production” first, with a single-line shift, and knew he’d gotten it right on the first try when the decoded letters started spelling out P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G. 

Illya tentatively decided that there was a line-shift after each word, but proceeding under that assumption, the message quickly reverted to gibberish. He tried again and found that it actually shifted every ten letters, whether that was in the middle of a word or not. Fairly clever. 

He didn’t get bogged down again until he hit the words “possible target.” What followed had to be some identification of a place, but no matter what Illya tried, he couldn’t get the cipher to resolve into the name of a city, country, landmark, or anything else.

It had to be coordinates, expressed in a different cipher. But it was still a string of two-digit numbers, with no digit higher than 5. Was there a way to do a Polybius Square to encode numbers? If Illya was making something up on the fly, he’d simply repeat the figures 0-9 to fill up the square, so that the number 0 could be expressed as 11, 31, or 51. To make it harder to crack, he might put in a key-number at the beginning, like the keyword in a regular Polybius square. Maybe the current year, or the year of the Revolution….

And that, he thought, was the limit of his ability. A strong of coordinates could be almost anything, so there was no way to check if he was on the right track. 

Illya wondered how far Solo had gotten. He thought he was more intelligent than Illya—but then, nearly everyone did. Illya’s most flattering nickname among his former colleagues had been “The Ox.” He’d been as surprised as anyone that Mr. Waverly had chosen him to pose as Gaby’s fiancée, on their first mission together. Not because he thought it implausible that he could attract a beautiful woman if he wanted, but because his superiors in the KGB generally thought him too thick to sustain an undercover role at all, much less a role as one of the _intelligentsia_. They agreed with Gaby’s uncle that he was more suited to building walls than designing them. 

He thought things might be different in this new organization, but over the last few weeks, he’d mostly functioned as muscle. Or a ladder, that time they had needed to put Gaby over a 12-foot wall. 

Over at the table, Solo groaned and mussed his irritatingly perfect hair. 

“Having trouble, Cowboy?”

“Almost there,” Solo said. 

He sounded like he was lying, but then, Solo tended to give that impression any time his mouth was open and words were coming out. Getting up, Illya went over and picked up the notepad Solo was working on. Glancing over it, and the torn-out pages with which Solo had littered the immediate area, he saw nothing but gibberish, and a lot of angry crossings-out. “You haven’t figured out yet that it is Polybius Square? I thought you said you knew what you were doing.”

“It isn’t.” Solo’s tone was just this side of patronizing. “That was one of the first things I tried.”

“Shifting Polybius square with keyword,” Illya told him. He handed the pad back and picked up the photograph, checking to make sure he had remembered it correctly. “Production proceeding on schedule. Ready for implementation in three to five days. Suggest test run 28 August, possible target--’ Next is coordinates; I haven’t figured out that part.”

Solo looked up at him, his mouth falling open slightly. 

Wondering if he was about to be accused of colluding with the criminals, Illya reminded him, “I saw it when I was developing film.”

“And you just…decoded it in your head.”

Illya had an excellent visual memory, but didn’t say so; he was not convinced that Solo needed to know. 

Solo shook his head. “So you’re more than just a pretty face, huh, Peril?”

Illya felt his lips twitch in a quickly-suppressed smile. This was hardly the first time in his career that he had been frustrated into revealing that he had something other than solid meat between his ears, but he was used to having it attributed to luck or coincidence. “For a spy, you are not very observant, Cowboy.” He handed Solo the newspaper—he could stand to give his language skills a workout. “Go comb your hair; I’ll finish this.”

#


	2. Book Club

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Illya and Gaby realize some things they have in common.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently this is no longer a one-shot...follows the pattern of the first, of showing the same events through two POVs; in this case, it's first Illya and then Gaby.

“Peril?” 

Illya looked up from the maps to see Solo standing in the doorway to their room, holding a plate. 

“Brought you something to eat,” Solo explained.

“That was…suspiciously thoughtful of you,” Illya said, accepting the plate. He’d stayed in the room to try and figure out the Hierarchy’s next target from a partial transmission Waverly had intercepted, while the other two went down to the hotel bar. He had been meaning to go down and get something to eat later.

“The kitchen was closing,” Solo explained. 

Was it that late? He glanced at his watch.

“After midnight,” Solo confirmed. 

Gaby showed up then, with an armful of beer bottles. Since she was not engaged to either of them for this mission, she had a room on another floor of the hotel, for propriety’s sake, but she spent more time in their room than she did in her own. She made as if to hand Solo one of the bottles, but he waved it off, going instead to the bottle of Scotch he’d stationed on the bureau. 

Undeterred, she waggled the bottle in Illya’s direction.

“No, thank you.”

Sitting down on one of the beds—Solo’s, not that Illya was paying attention—she observed, “You’re the only Russian I’ve ever met who doesn’t drink.”

“I don’t not drink,” he said. “I’m just not drinking.”

Solo cocked his head to one side like a confused dog. “Would that have made sense in Russian?”

Illya sighed and tried again. “I mean, it isn’t that I never drink, I’m just not drinking right now.”

“Or any time in the last…what has it been? Six weeks?” she asked.

“Almost seven,” Solo said.

“Fine. If it means that much to you, I’ll have beer.”

She bounced up from the bed and brought him one. Illya carefully rolled up the maps and set them aside. He took a long pull from the beer, followed by a bite of the sandwich, which was better than it looked, except for the excess of tomato ketchup. “I should have come down. I need a larger-scale map before I’ll get anywhere with this.” He could have at least gotten his own choice of sandwich.

“We’ll have to go out for one in the morning,” Gaby said. 

“I don’t know; Cowboy could break into a travel agent’s.”

Solo put down his drink, a little more firmly than was really necessary. Illya looked up sharply at the click of glass on wood. “You know, I don’t know why you have to keep taking shots at me about that.”

“I thought you were proud of your skills as thief,” Illya said, because he had. He certainly didn’t agree that it was something to be proud of, but Solo didn’t seem to miss any opportunity to boast about it.

“Even if I am, you have a _tone_ , when you talk about it,” Solo said. “And I—okay, I am absolutely not trying to talk shit about your dad, here—I like having my spine inside my body—but it seems a little hypocritical. Stealing from the Soviet Union is OK, but stealing from Nazis isn’t?”

And this was why he hadn’t been drinking. It took more than a few sips of beer to make him say things that he shouldn’t…but they had swept the room thoroughly for bugs when they checked in, and he hadn’t left it since. “My father was not a thief,” he said in a low growl. Had he ever said those words out loud before? He’d barely even uttered them in the privacy of his own thoughts. 

There was a long silence; Illya looked up to see Solo looking at him with a dubious expression. “No?” Solo asked.

“Maybe he took a few kickbacks,” Illya conceded. “Everyone at that level does, in Soviet Union. But he was no worse than anyone else, and better than most. Stalin took a dislike to him, sent him to Kolyma. It happened a lot.”

Gaby spoke up. “He sent whole villages of ethnic Germans to the camps, in the war. Stalin, I mean. Not Illya’s father.” She glanced over at Illya. “And it’s still happening, in occupied Germany at least. Whole families hauled away for painting a slogan on a wall, or distributing leaflets.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” Illya said. That was a different conversation. “Theft of state property is treason. If he had really done it, he’d have been _shot_ , and _we_ would have been sent to the camps. My mother and I. Only sentencing him to ten years is as much as admitting he was innocent.” He shook his head. “Everyone in KGB knows this, but they refuse to reopen his case and rehabilitate him—maybe in another few months, maybe after Party Congress, maybe next year. They think it _motivates_ me, or something like this. Meanwhile I am expected to salute and say, yes, my father is Enemy of the People, and State and Party are so generous to permit me to atone for his crimes.” He knocked back the last of the beer, setting the bottle down with something that was more like a _crash_ than a _click_. 

“And you,” he said to Solo. “You, who did steal, drinks Scotch and wear hundred-dollar suits--”

“Two hundred,” Solo said. Illya suspected it was some kind of reflex. “Not…that it matters.”

“—while my father, who did not, starved to death cutting logs in Siberia. Yes, I resent this. Who wouldn’t?”

Gaby padded over and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. Illya glanced over—with him sitting and her standing, they were nearly of a height—and gave her a small smile of thanks. “Why,” she began, then hesitated. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking. Why do you work for them?”

“The same reason my mother was so ‘popular’ with the Party elite after my father’s arrest. To protect us. The homes for Children of Enemies of the People are…not so good. She did what she had to do to keep us out of gulag, to make sure I had clothing and food to eat. And when one of her—whatever you want to call them—got me a place in training program for KGB…?” He shrugged. “It would have looked ungrateful and suspicious to refuse. Especially since, with black mark against me, I would never have been admitted to high school, let alone university. I was fourteen; it was either accept this generous opportunity or be assigned to unskilled labor on some farm or factory God knows where—maybe even Siberia, if I am lucky.”  
#

Gaby was surprised when Napoleon mentioned Illya’s father, and no furniture went flying. The two of them had been getting along better lately, but anything to do with his parents was a reliable trigger for Illya’s temper—which Gaby was not ashamed to admit she found genuinely frightening. He could be very sweet at times, but in cooler moments, she was glad nothing romantic had developed between them. She’d seen enough, in the war and after, not to have any romantic illusions about taming his demons with the simple love of her pure heart. 

That, and, he was KGB. She knew that what the Third Reich had done was worse, but the Soviet occupation was not a gentle one, and the KGB was the fist at the end of the USSR’s long arm. 

Even more surprising was when Illya ground out, in a barely-audible voice, “My father was not a thief.” She knew, of course, that there was a good chance he hadn’t been, and that Illya must know it too—but to have built a career in the KGB, he must have buried that knowledge in a deep, dark hole and never looked at it. 

After all, she knew a thing or two about the ritual self-abasement necessary to be forgiven for having a father like his. 

“Maybe he took a few kickbacks,” Illya conceded. “Everyone at that level does, in Soviet Union. But he was no worse than anyone else, and better than most. Stalin took a dislike to him, sent him to Kolyma. It happened a lot.”

He was right on all counts—she was surprised the Soviets had managed to build their wall, without all of the bricks going missing on the way to Berlin. Nothing could pass through a Russian’s hands without a little being skimmed off the top. “He sent whole villages of ethnic Germans to the camps, in the war,” she told Napoleon. “Stalin, I mean. Not Illya’s father.” She glanced over at Illya. “And it’s still happening, in occupied Germany at least. Whole families hauled away for painting a slogan on a wall, or distributing leaflets.”

He had to know that; there was no way he could be KGB and not know that. 

“I never said it wasn’t,” Illya said, glancing over at her before returning his attention to Napoleon, and explaining how the relative lightness of his father’s sentence, and the fact that the whole family hadn’t shared his punishment, was evidence of his innocence. 

“And you,” he sneered at Napoleon, “You, who did steal, drink Scotch and wear hundred-dollar suits,   
while my father, who did not, starved to death cutting logs in Siberia. Yes, I resent this. Who _wouldn’t_?”

And Gaby knew that one, too. Knew how much she resented those who had collaborated with the Nazi regime as much as or more than her father had, and who walked around free, even occupying the same positions they had during the Reich, while her father had been hounded into exile. 

Illya was KGB, but he was also a victim of that relentless fist. Getting up, she went quietly over and stood next to him, placing her hand on his shoulder. He rejected anything like sympathy or affection if he was paying attention, but now he was focused enough on Solo not to really notice, and leaned back, unconsciously, into her touch. 

“Why,” she began, then stopped. He’d already told them things he must have never told anyone; was it fair to push for more? But it wasn’t as though she were asking out of prurient curiosity; his answer made all the difference in the world. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking. Why do you work for them?”

He answered promptly, another surprise. “The same reason my mother was so ‘popular’ with the Party elite after my father’s arrest.” That was clearly directed to Napoleon; she wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, although she could guess. “To protect us.”

The same reason, after all, that her father had collaborated with the Nazis. Illya went on to give details, but Gaby didn’t need them. Napoleon, she could tell, didn’t understand. As an American, maybe he _couldn’t_ understand. It had been almost a century since they’d had a war on their soil; her homeland, and Illya’s, had had two in as many generations. His country had _never_ had a dictator; her country had had two in just her lifetime, Hitler and the Soviet occupiers. 

Illya went on to say, “Especially since, with black mark against me, I would never have been admitted to secondary school, let alone university. I was fourteen; it was either accept this generous opportunity or be assigned to unskilled labor on some farm or factory God knows where—maybe even Siberia, if I am lucky.”

Napoleon looked puzzled, as if he couldn’t imagine what one’s father’s actions might possibly have to do with being allowed to attend school or not. “I thought I was going to be an engineer, once,” Gaby said. “I had kind teachers; they tried to gently discourage me. I thought it was because I was a girl. My aunt had to tell me, there were no places in University for people whose fathers had been war criminals.”

Illya looked over at her, seeming to really see her for the first time in this conversation—before it, had been as though she were merely suggesting topics for him to expound upon to Solo. “For me, it was mathematics. I thought, there is no ideological component, so perhaps…but no.”

“So you became a big, bad KGB man, and I became a little chop-shop girl,” Gaby said. “We ought to start a book club.”

“I’d like that.” 

Napoleon cleared his throat—right, it had been nearly thirty seconds they weren’t paying attention to him. “I didn’t go to college, either.”

Illya and Gaby shared a look. “And why is that?” Illya said, with exaggerated patience.

“Money, I guess. Parents couldn’t afford to send me…there’re scholarships, after the Army, but…well, you know what happened there.”

“I’m not sure that choosing life of crime qualifies you for book club,” Illya said. 

“We’ll confer and get back to you,” Gaby added.


	3. Galleries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Illya and Napoleon have a talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for this one to last_ship_home, who suggested "something to do with art" for the Napoleon chapter. I ended up not using your more specific ideas, but they got me started!

Stepping up beside Solo, Illya looked at the painting that Solo was looking at—a still life, focusing on a blue glass phial—and said, without turning his head, “Gaby says we’ll be ready to go in an hour.”

He’d been a little worried, in the early weeks of their partnership, about Solo’s predilection for visiting the nearest art museum whenever they had free time. The dissolution of this new UNCLE team would mean Illya was sent back to the USSR in even more disgrace than usual, and there would be no quicker way to break up the team than for Solo to be caught planning a heist.

But by now, lllya was nearly sure he wasn’t planning anything of the kind. Illya was beginning to suspect that he just liked art. 

Turning away from the painting, Solo said, “Just in case you’re wondering, I wasn’t planning to steal it.”

Keeping pace with Solo as they left the gallery, Illya said, “I didn’t think you were.”

“I already did.”

Illya missed a step in his surprise.

“It was returned to this museum after I was caught,” Solo explained. 

“So you come here to visit it?”

Solo shrugged. “I always liked that one. It was, um…my outfit, after the war, we were assigned to this Chateau that the Nazis used as a base when they were occupying France. The higher-ups, you know. It was full of stuff they had looted. Not just art—jewelry, cars, fully stocked wine cellar…just everything you can imagine, from all over Europe. We were inventorying it all. I found that painting—stashed in a crate with lots of others—and I took it to my room and hung it up there for a while. That kind of thing was…not really allowed, but everyone did it. Drove the Nazi cars, let our girlfriends wear the Nazi jewelry and fur coats, drank a little of the wine, smoked some of the cigars…we were all just regular Joes, but for a while there, we got to live like kings.”

Illya thought of what happened to kings in France, and other places. He thought of the apartment they had lived in when his father was still Party elite. He thought of his mother’s fur coat and jewelry, sold to buy his school-books and a decent pair of shoes. 

“It went to everybody’s head, a little bit. I mean, I’m not making excuses,” Solo added. “But it felt like a big ‘up yours’ to the Nazis. Treating their stolen treasures like they were our own. After a while, I had a nice collection in my room—not the most valuable pieces, just ones I liked. It was a talking point, with girls—‘oh, you like art? Come up and see my private gallery.’ I was going to inventory it all properly and put it back where I got it, eventually—it’s not like I could stuff it into my duffle bag and take it home.   
But then this girl…Angelique…she said she had an uncle who collected art, and he’d pay good money if I could slip something out. He wanted a….” Solo thought for several paces. “A Holbein, I’m pretty sure it was. As luck would have it, I had one.”

“So you sold it to him.”

“I sold it to him,” Solo agreed. “And he knew another collector with a gap in his collection he wanted to fill…and he knew somebody else…and he knew another one…. I started getting--‘commissions,’ I called them—for things we didn’t have at the Chateau, so I’d ask around other outfits with assignments like mine…and it all just kind of took off. By the time I left the Army, I had learned the trade. Thought about trying to get a job with a legitimate art dealer—but I didn’t have any experience I could talk about, and—let’s be honest—the money wasn’t nearly as good. So I just kept going.” He shrugged. “I wonder what my life would be like if I hadn’t liked that painting quite so much?”

They passed out of the museum, walking in silence for a few moments. Solo’s story didn’t make him any less a thief—the Nazis had stolen all of those things in the first place, and just because they had murdered the rightful owners didn’t make them Solo’s to do with as he pleased. But the painting that had first tempted him was such an unassuming little thing, and Illya had liked it, too. 

Wonder of wonders, he and the Cowboy had something in common. 

Illya’s artistic education had begun and ended with the Socialist Realists, so it was hopeless to try to say something intelligent about it. He almost said nothing at all, rather than risk looking uncultured by voicing his uninformed opinion. “I liked the blue.”

Solo glanced over at him and smiled. It looks false, much more so than Solo’s other smiles, which made Illya wonder if it was, in fact, real. “So did I.”

#

 

Napoleon was unsurprised when Peril stepped up to his side and started looking at the same painting he was looking at, even though Napoleon hadn’t told either of the others where he was going. 

He wondered when his teammates’ habit of planting bugs and tracking devices on him had stopped seeming creepy, and started feeling sort of…comforting. Like if the CIA suddenly decided to yank his leash all the way back to some black ops site in a banana republic, someone would notice, and care. 

Of course, he knew that the real reason they did it was that they didn’t trust him, but in Napoleon’s book, a man was entitled to whatever fantasies got him through the day. 

“Gaby says we’ll be ready to go in an hour,” Kuryakin said, without looking at him.

Napoleon looked at the painting for another moment, drinking in the details and also wondering if Kuryakin was going to say anything else.

Apparently not. He turned away from the painting, and Illya fell into step beside him. “Just in case you’re wondering, I wasn’t planning to steal it.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

He said it like he had Napoleon all figured out—but, Peril’s suddenly-apparent braininess notwithstanding, Napoleon knew he was the team’s expert in reading people. Ha paused a beat and said, “I already did.”

Kuryakin actually tripped over a shadow on the floor. Would throwing Mr. Stoic Russian Spy for a loop ever get old? Napoleon hoped not. The day he got tired of that was the day he was tired of living. 

He waited just long enough for Kuryakin to get worried before adding, “It was returned to this museum after I was caught.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Napoleon could see Kuryakin trying valiantly to look like he had known that that what what Napoleon meant. “So you come here to visit it?”

He shrugged. “I always liked that one.” 

He wondered if he ought to try to explain, how he had ended up an international art thief. He’d wanted to, or felt like he ought to, ever since Illya had told them that he believed his father had been falsely imprisoned. It had cost Illya a hell of a lot to say that—and he’d have known it even without Gaby cornering him later to explain, in words of one syllable, that being indiscrete with this information was highly likely to lead to a fatal outcome for Illya, as well as giving him, Napoleon, more than one reason to worry about the location of his spine. 

Anyway, it took balls for Illya to tell them that. Balls, and a hell of a lot of trust. Sure, he’d tried to disguise it by throwing the information at him in an argument, but deep down, Peril believed in this team. 

And since Peril was—justifiably—the most paranoid of the lot of them, Napoleon wondered if that meant he ought to start believing in it, too. 

“My outfit, after the war, we were assigned to this Chateau that the Nazis used as a base.” Napoleon went on to explain about the Chateau, trying to find the words to express how unbelievable it had all been, that people actually lived like that in real life, not the movies. And everyone had gotten a little dizzy with it. Even the real uptight guys, the ones who wouldn’t so much as buy or sell C-ration cigarettes on the black market, had driven the cars, drank the wine, played around with it all like kids in a candy shop. 

“It went to everybody’s head, a little bit. I mean, I’m not making excuses.” He knew it would sound like he was; he knew his story wasn’t enough to get him into the Wrongly Accused Fathers Book Club. He had done what he did, and he had a hard time even feeling guilty about it, even though he could parrot all the reasons why he should feel guilty. “But it felt like a big ‘up yours’ to the Nazis.” He hadn’t thought about the rightful owners of any of that stuff, the ones the Nazis had stolen it from in the first place. But Wiseman and Ginsburg hadn’t, either.

When he got to the part about Angelique and her uncle, he hesitated before saying, “A Holbein, I’m pretty sure it was.” He knew for certain it was a Holbein, but he thought Illya might not know a Holbein from a Holstein, and Napoleon didn’t want to put him on the defensive.

“So you sold it to him,” Illya said, his tone flat and unreadable.

“I sold it to him,” Solo agreed. “And he knew another collector with a gap in his collection he wanted to fill…and he knew somebody else…and he knew another one….” It had been like holding a tiger by the ears, at the beginning—he was terrified of getting caught, but was it ever a wild ride. 

Later, it had come to seem a lot more like a job. So much so that he actually _did_ try to get a job at a gallery, only to be very politely laughed out of the place when all he could say about his experience was that he had “seen a lot of paintings in the Army.” He tried to explain about the Chateau, about his private collection, but he had the feeling they thought he was talking about girlie postcards. 

And yes, he could’ve gone to college on the GI Bill, studied art history, worked his way up on the legitimate side of the business. Or he could step right back into a field where he was already a rising star. It had seemed like an easy choice at the time. 

He ended the story with a sheepish shrug. “I wonder what my life would be like if I hadn’t liked that painting quite so much?”

Kuryakin didn’t say anything for a while, just walked along with that fixed expression that made him look like he was trying to figure out how to walk and breathe at the same time. Napoleon knew now that it really meant he was thinking hard. 

In this case, probably thinking about where to start with telling Napoleon how he was a morally bankrupt degenerate whose mother dressed him funny. 

But when he finally did speak, he said, almost shyly, “I liked the blue.”

It took Solo a moment to realize what he meant—the blue bottle, in the painting. That had been the first thing that caught his eye, too. It was rich and luminous; he hadn’t known a blue like that existed. 

But what struck Napoleon, even more than that they had liked the same thing—after all, it was a pretty amazing blue; he had a hard time understanding how anyone _couldn’t_ like it—was that Illya had actually _said_ so. For all his lack of formal education—and the gigantic chip on his gigantic shoulder about it—Illya had to know that “I liked the blue” wasn’t the sort thing that people said when they wanted to make it sound like they knew something about art. 

“So did I,” Napoleon said. 

He put everything he had into making it not sound patronizing, and apparently it worked; Peril gave him another one of those shy smiles and thought some more. As they turned down the street to their hotel, he said, “Does Amsterdam have any paintings you like?”

Amsterdam was where they were going next, unless Mr. Waverly had a surprise in store. “They do,” Napoleon said. It was his turn now, wasn’t it? To make some kind of a gesture. “Maybe we can find time to see them. All of us, I mean, if Gaby wants to go.”

Illya considered this for a while. “That might be nice. Only if mission permits, of course.”

“Of course.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I _think_ this is complete now, unless I get a really good idea for a Napoleon-and-Gaby chapter.


End file.
